Afraid of poetry? Try these tips

By Joseph Campana |
April 24, 2012

Joseph Campana, an assistant professor at Rice University, spends a good portion of his day reading, writing or thinking about poetry. His most recent book of poetry, ?Natural Selections,? received the Iowa Poetry Prize.

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"Natural Selections" by Joseph Campana ($18, University of Iowa Press, 82 pp.). "Natural Selections," a book of poetry by Rice University's Joseph Campana

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Starter poems

Joseph Campana recommends these poems for people taking their first dip into poetry.

1. William Carlos Williams: "Danse Russe"

2. Joy Harjo: "She Had Some Horses"

3. James Wright: "To the Saguaro Cactus Tree in the Desert Rain"

4. Gwendolyn Brooks: "The sonnet-ballad"

5. Russell Edson: "Ape and Coffee"

I'm not sure I understand the primal fear poetry inspires in so many. My conversations with people of all ages and walks of life suggest that most assume it to be an art utterly out of reach.

Take my mother.

"But I don't understand poetry!" she exclaimed years ago, when I told her I had started to publish poems. There was something touching in my mother's sudden terror that she would not be able to understand her own child.

Soon after this conversation, my first book of poems, "The Book of Faces," was accepted for publication. I can only imagine the anxieties this provoked, but at that point I was finishing a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature. Did the ghost of Shakespeare really bother my mother less than the idea of poetry? Apparently so.

And it isn't just my mother. One of my very fine, prize-winning undergraduates at Rice University said to me just the other day, "Poetry is a beast I don't understand."

I've been thinking a lot lately about the way people assume poetry to be a foreign language as I launch a series of readings from my newest book of poems, "Natural Selections." There's nothing like the look of recognition you see in the faces of a crowd when people suddenly forget they can't understand poetry when they hear it live.

As April is National Poetry Month, I want to offer a few words of advice and encouragement for anyone who, like Mother, thinks poetry isn't for her. Poetry, after all, is for everyone.

1. Relax. Most people decide in advance that they can't understand poetry, and it quickly becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy. The anxiety behind this feeling is that the world won't make sense and that when we don't understand something we look stupid.

One of the great pleasures of poetry can be the way it asks us to see the world differently. Often, it uses nonsense or what I think of as half-sense to offer new perspectives. There are worse things by far than not understanding something. If we understood everything immediately, there would be no mystery in the world and no reason to think about anything.

2. Enjoy. Poetry taps into the fundamental vitality and rhythms of mind and body. Sometimes we know this as pure pleasure. When a poem is sad or haunting or complex, we may not feel pleasure, but we do feel a little more alive for having experienced the poem.

Matthew Vale, one of my students and a very talented writer, put it well when I asked him what advice he would give readers new to poetry: "It doesn't matter that you understand it immediately. Sometimes what's important is that it sounds nice."

Often people assume we either comprehend or we enjoy. On the contrary, literary pleasure makes possible a form of background thinking. You may not notice it happening, but enjoyment makes you understand the world more deeply.

3. Listen. I recently read from "Natural Selections" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which licensed the book's beautiful cover based on a lithograph by Grant Wood called "March." In the question and answer period, many people complimented me by saying, "Poetry is meant to be heard."

Poetry is meant to be encountered however we find it, on the page or in person. But readings are special. Houston is a rich literary town, and you can enjoy anything from the high-end evening readings downtown sponsored by Inprint to a Saturday afternoon reading at a branch of the Houston Public Library through its Public Poetry program.

Up close and personal is how I like a poetry reading, but the digital resources for poetry readings grow exponentially. You can also find wonderful materials at the Poetry Archive (poetryarchive.org), the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), or, if local is your flavor, Houston's Taping for the Blind (tapingfortheblind.org), which archives readings by many Houston poets including yours truly.

When you listen, ask yourself how the poem is asking you to listen. The way you do when someone's talking directly to you? The way you do when you overhear a conversation? Is the poem shouting at you? Asking you to laugh with it? Poems can be charming or wicked and they work best we when allow them to invite us into the conversations they create.

4. Slow down. Online poetry resources get better every day, but don't let the allure of digital rapidity whisk you away before you can really experience poetry. Even when a poem is brief and can be read quickly, poetry is the original slow art. When we think about how we entertain ourselves, we could learn a lot from the slow-food movement. Poems feed the part of the mind that meditates slowly, and they teach us that most things aren't so hard to think about if you give them enough time.

5. Read and reread. Often we think that a poem that isn't perfectly clear the first time we read it must be badly written or just not our cup of tea. What's the rush? Good poems are better every time we read them and richly repay frequent visits.

6. Make poetry a daily habit. Who says only April is for poetry? Try, for a month, reading a poem every day. There are many ways of getting a daily dose. Websites such as Poetry Daily and Verse Daily are in that very business. And the Academy of American Poets will sign you up for a daily poem. What could be better than samples of scintillating language in your inbox each morning? It beats spam, and it'll make you a keener reader.